The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

“Never kill anything that’s rare,”

My father did not permit crimes against the land.

my mother kept us strangers to her own interior life.

we did not know that mothers dreamed.

we did not know that mothers dreamed.

they both loved us deeply, but, as with many parents, their love proved to be the most lethal thing about them.

they both loved us deeply, but, as with many parents, their love proved to be the most lethal thing about them.

They were remarkable in so many ways that the gifts they bestowed almost equaled the havoc they so thoughtlessly wreaked.

They were remarkable in so many ways that the gifts they bestowed almost equaled the havoc they so thoughtlessly wreaked.

I cannot forgive her for not telling me about the dream that sustained her during my childhood,

I cannot forgive her for not telling me about the dream that sustained her during my childhood,

Science was of no interest to Lila Wingo, but nature was a passion.

Science was of no interest to Lila Wingo, but nature was a passion.

there is no magic to nightmares.

there is no magic to nightmares.

It’s an act of will to have a memory or not,

It’s an act of will to have a memory or not,

I seem to embody everything that is wrong with the twentieth century.

I seem to embody everything that is wrong with the twentieth century.

I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them.

I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them.

Your life isn’t over, Tom. One part of your life is. You’ve got to find out what the next part is going to be.”

I had a limitless gift for turning even those sweet souls who loved me best into strangers.

I never know exactly how I feel about something. There’s always something secret hidden from me.”

“You don’t need to know the absolute truth. No one does. You only need to know enough to get along.”

“You blame your parents for so much, Tom. When does it start becoming your own responsibility?

People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

She did not move or look up when we entered the room. And I knew this would be one of the bad times.

I remembered something she had told me: that deep within her stillness and solitude, her spirit was healing itself in the unreachable places, mining the riches and ores that lay concealed in the most inaccessible passages of her mind.

a mushroom salad so fresh it was like tasting the bottom of the forest.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences,

The task I had set for myself that summer was simple enough: I was to embark on a grand tour of self. I would study the events and accidents that had led to the creation of a defensive and mediocre man.

I had lost nearly thirty-seven years to the image I carried of myself. I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents’ definition of me.

We did not know then that she was a most unhappy woman. Nor did we know she would never quite forgive us for growing up. But growing up was a misdemeanor compared to our one unforgivable crime: being born in the first place.

I have tried to understand women, and this obsession has left me both enraged and ridiculous. The gulf is too vast and oceanic and treacherous. There is a mountain range between the sexes with no exotic race of Sherpas to translate the enigmas of those deadly slopes that separate us. Since I failed to know my mother, I was denied the gift of knowing the other women who would cross my path.

Eventually she will die the way all old people in America die . . . from humiliation, incontinence, boredom, and neglect.

Because I’m an American, I let her die by degrees, isolated and abandoned by her family.

they treat old people like meat carcasses hanging on steel hooks in freezers.

She was the kind of woman who knew instinctively that extreme happiness could not be duplicated; she knew how to shut a door properly on the past.

once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.

There was a grace and a scrupulous integrity in the manner she salvaged something essential from our dangerous tournament of wills.

I stayed in South Carolina. It wasn’t so much a failure of nerve as it was a failure of imagination.”

something in her voice, something that sang with all the undertones of a hard-earned wisdom, knew that her father’s story was the oldest and most dispiriting story in the world. It made me think of all the women in my life—my mother, sister, wife, and daughters—and how I could make a strong case that I had betrayed each of them by a strategic collapse of my own love when they needed it the most.

I was teaching one day and reading “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas to one of my classes;

Like most southerners, Tolitha had fashioned a small and personal art form out of ancestor worship, and the authentic intimacy of cemeteries made her happy.

Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world.

From my father I inherited a sense of humor, a capacity for hard work, physical strength, a dangerous temper, a love of the sea, and an attraction to failure. From my mother I received far darker and more valuable gifts: a love of language, the ability to lie without remorse, a killer instinct, a passion to teach, madness, and the romance of fanaticism.

I was telling a class composed of all those students who had ever loved me as a teacher that the reason Tolstoy was great was because he was passionate.

I could not figure out what my mother saw in my father or why she remained as both ruler and prisoner in his house.